With millions of views on YouTube and a chilling premise, Other Side of the Box has earned its place as one of the creepiest short films online. Its intriguing storyline raises more questions than answers, leaving viewers eager to discuss and dissect it. But what does it all mean? Why is there a creepy head in a box, and is there any way to destroy it?

We sat down with director Caleb Philips to uncover the answers.

If you’d prefer to read the interview, than watch the video, you can do so below:

So it’s fair to say that Other Side of the Box has been a massive hit on YouTube. To start, and what I really want to know is, where did the idea for Other Side of the Box come from?

Okay, yeah, it’s sort of a two-fold source because one comes from growing up in the middle of the country with like no curtains on our windows. So we were like surrounded by black all the time, like big black windows. And like I couldn’t think of anything scarier than walking downstairs and seeing somebody outside like looking in through a window. And then the other one is it was storming in our hometown and I was driving by these drainage ditches that just look like rivers after a while and I just started imagining all of these heads poking up and like following me down this little river and watching me. And when I got to LA I wanted to do something cheap and when you want to make a cheap horror film you’re like okay well we got to do something in a house with like two people. And I love a good mystery box movie and it just kind of all fell into itself combined.

A lot of our YouTube commenters have praised Other Side of the Box for its kind of approach to horror. This is a film that’s more about a steady build of tension. Was this something you thought about when making the film? Did you ever consider taking a different approach?

It was always kind of the same except for the ending, the ending took a while. For me, I didn’t even start out wanting to make a horror film. I wanted to make a really sort of like tense, standoff, mystery movie. The hardest part was trying to figure out how not to do a jump scare ending because it always felt a bit forgettable whenever I’ve seen it. I just don’t feel like I’ve seen a whole lot of films where you get to stare at the monster the whole time and it doesn’t like ruin it. And that was really exciting to me.

It seems a bit early in the interview to jump into the ending, but I do really want to talk about it. Can you talk a little bit about how you got to that, how you came to that ending?

I want to say we had like everything up until the twist where he comes back home. Like that, that was probably figured out within like two or three weeks. But the ending took about like two months. I knew I wanted it to be weird. So there were like weird, weird endings where like Ben came back and like, like the box that Box Monster’s head was on her body or like just really weird stuff. And I just didn’t like any of it. And I remember sitting and hanging out with my dad and just talking it through and just being like, well, maybe there’s just like a bunch of them. And then it started to kind of click. And I found this red light, green light moment. And originally it was going to be in a hallway. Like, it was like, OK, we need to corner him in a hallway. But we had trouble finding that hallway. And when we were location scouting, we stumbled on this stairwell. And we didn’t even know it was there. We were looking at the house for other reasons. And when we found the stairwell, we were like, oh, this is obviously where it happened. So yeah, it’s a mixture of beating my head against the wall and luck.

Looking at the comments on YouTube about your film, Other Side of the Box gets a lot of praise for the fact that your film doesn’t really rely on CGI for its scares. Can you provide a little insight into kind of that side of shooting the film?

Besides seeing below the table, which is a tiny bit of the effects work, it is completely practical with a little bit of colour grading. So what we did was we painted the inside of the box, cut a hole in a table and had the dude stick his head through it. And then in post, I power windowed some of the darker parts of the box just to make sure, in fact, was a void. The box we had, we had to cut because they don’t make boxes that short and it needed to be that short. So the actor could get his head through. So the box that we always use doesn’t have a bottom. It is like being held together by the actor. So whenever he looks inside, it’s just straight up like an open hole. And you just put a little black solid in After Effects and just like track it around.

Before I talk about some of my own personal favorites, do you follow the YouTube comments? Or do you check in every now and then?

I check in every now and then. Yeah, whenever there’s like a surge in views I’m like, oh, I want to see what people are saying.

Do you have any favorite kind of fan theories or comments that are out there?

I’d have to think I mostly love how many people like insist on like different ways to hurt the box like stabbing, shooting, lighting on fire. And that cracks me up because I can assure you that if any of the characters do that, like, it will go badly for them.

Like you say, there are a lot of people out there who have theories on how they would attack this box. Some of my favorites are like setting fire to it and squirting lemon in the eyes of the man in the box, which I thought was quite a novel approach. Like you say, you think that would end badly? Did you ever consider them trying to do something to the man in the box?

Any sort of normal solution that you can think of, I would have to as the writer make sure like the characters are punished for trying it because it’s all about feeling this sort of like impossible, bizarre, inexplicable thing in your living room. But yeah, no, there are definitely thoughts. I mean, technically, I don’t know if people catch it, but whenever Ben returns home and the knife is on the floor, like there’s water, like in my mind, she stabbed one of them and they bleed water. And that’s what we’re finding on the floor. It’s not explicit, but I don’t think stabbing will hurt. I don’t think lemon juice will work. I don’t think a gun will work. I think destroying the box might have horrible consequences.

And you mentioned water. Quite a few commenters have picked up on the role that water plays in the film. Does water have a role to play in Other Side of the Box?

It absolutely does. I’m just not gonna tell people what it is. I think the most I can say is that it’s absolutely a reflection of their environment, where they come, what they need. I mean, like on a very base level for me, it was just, it felt very uncomfortable. Like there’s this sense of being born and this, I really like the idea that like we need water so much and to like make water like this very gross thing made me very uncomfortable. But I think it’s very much a reflection of like how their bodies work and where they come from.

Where they come from is another kind of hot topic in the comments. So what did you initially have in mind when you came up with the idea of this portal-like box?

For me, I really liked the idea of a hole in reality. Like I don’t think that these people are coming out of a box. I think that there’s like this tear in space that happens to be in a box. And I think they’re like poking their heads through when somebody threw a pencil through. Like I think they were like unaware that this was here for a while and then somebody disturbed it. I think the world is massive on the other side. But yeah, that’s about the extent at which I’ll share.

One of the things with a successful short film is that there’s always gonna be calls to see more from that universe. From your point of view, has there ever been any thoughts around developing the story further? And have you ever been approached by anyone in terms of developing it?

It’s been a long conversation off and on. I put it on pause ’cause I wanted to work on a different film. And in the meantime, I’ve been thinking about more ideas for it, but I only really want to do it if I think it’s an excellent idea. Because I think that there’s like a version of this movie that is kind of disposable and, I don’t know, cheap. And I just haven’t wanted to do that. But yeah, there have been a lot of conversations. And honestly, with how the film continues to grow in popularity, like that’s the thing that keeps me coming back. Yeah, I would really love to do a feature version of it. It would just have to be the right feature version.

And what can you tell us about what you’re working on now?

I just wrapped up production on a horror feature film called Impostors. It’s, yeah, I am really excited about it. It’s a movie about a couple who has their baby kidnapped and police get involved, the woods nearby are searched. They have no idea where their baby is. A mysterious man comes to their house and says, I didn’t take your baby. I don’t know where he is, but I know how you can get him back. And he tells them about a cave on their property that can give them back things that they’ve lost. The wife goes in, the husband doesn’t, and she returns hours later with blood on her face and their baby. And she insists she doesn’t know what happened. She doesn’t remember what happened. She just walked in and walked out with him. But the husband starts to catch her in lies and he starts to believe that this isn’t his child and that she knows it. And we’re like the midway of the movie. It’s this like gaslighting thing back and forth where he keeps catching her in lies and she keeps acting weird. But at the third act, he goes in and we like learn where the baby came from, what happened to her. And the movie kind of transforms into this violent thriller. And I think it’s got a really cool twist and a really cool ending.